woulda deleted this altogether if I knew how
Yeah, what is this? My daughter does this, too, and it infuriates me because my help ends up devolving into an argument on why there are sometimes more than one right way to things. I used to think it was a particular teacher, but I find its universal to all her teachers that they are held as the end-all-be-all Arbiter of True and Accurate Information and the Only Way To Do This™. Yeah, right.
How do you deal with this and where do you draw the line when faced with the situation teaching your kids an alternate way of doing something or correcting inaccurate/misleading information provided by the teacher?
We’ve been fortunate in that our kids’ schools mostly have a culture of letting kids try different ways of solving problems, if they want to.
I have occasionally had to let my kids know that something a teacher told them was inaccurate or incomplete (or an urban legend, in some cases.)
Mine are 9 and 11 and both have quite a bit of homework, although my daughter usually has most of hers done by the time she gets home. We don’t “correct” their homework, but we do show them where they have made errors and let them correct them. My husband has to really reign himself in from dictating written work (he’s an English major), but he’s getting better.
One problem we have run into is that they are occasionally given problems that don’t seem solvable at their level. Just recently my daughter was given a problem involving the relative ages of two siblings that clearly required algebra to solve without just randomly plugging in numbers, but she hasn’t been taught that yet. I think textbooks just get sloppy sometimes.
If it’s actually inaccurate or misleading, we talk about it and I provide cites, same as I would here. I don’t frame it as “I’m right and she’s wrong,” but, “Hmm…I was taught ABC, not XYZ. Let’s go do some research and find out where the crossed signals are!” I always assume (out loud, if not in my head) it’s a miscommunication, not an error.
If we determine that yes, she’s wrong, he’s instructed to make his own decision about how to handle it. Long time Dopers might recall a thread wherein I whined that my kid’s teacher used the Alanis Morissette song “Ironic” to teach a unit on Irony. No problem, except that nothing in that song is actually irony! He knew this, or thought he did, and came to me for verification. We dutifully looked up the definitions of irony on several websites, the dictionary, and asked my English teacher husband. Of course, I knew the correct definition as well, but I wanted to reinforce that we’re not always correct in what we think we know, and corroboration from experts is never a bad idea. When he was firmly convinced that his teacher was mistaken, I left it to him to decide if he wanted to confront her or not. He chose not to. In this case, I think the important thing is that HE knows what irony really means and he’ll carry that with him for life, because he taught himself about it.
If it’s a longer term error that’s damaging to more of his education, then I’d talk to the teacher myself. It’s not a comfortable conversation, but I go about it from a “you won’t believe what WhyKid misunderstood! I know you couldn’t possibly have said this, but somehow he got the idea…” and I have the correct information to hand over for her perusal. She doesn’t have to be defensive, but this lets her decide if she wants to keep teaching the wrong thing. I had to do this once for a unit on world religions and once in my own biology class on the subject of chimerism.
If it’s just a matter of a difference in procedure, like the lattice system of multiplication, I’ll show him my method and have him teach me his method. And then we laugh over how it’s difficult to use the other person’s method and isn’t it a good thing that there’s more than one way to do it. But I’ve learned I cannot make him use my method on him homework, which means there’s some homework I just can’t help him with - especially as he gets into higher grades.
I’ll get the official word tomorrow night at Open House. With the 3rd grader, it’s mostly check for completeness, and in the areas with objective factual answers checking for correctness. I’ll indicate which ones are wrong, but let him figure out the problem. For example, last night, he had an assignment on rounding numbers to the nearest 1000, 100, 10, etc. The round-ups were all correct; the round-downs all had the same error. It was obvious he didn’t grasp how to do it correctly. I went over it with him again with a number line, he figured out what he was doing wrong, and corrected all the problems himself.
For more subjective stuff like creative writing, I just make sure he did the work, and point out the spelling errors. For grammar errors, I’ll ask him to read it out loud and see if anything sounds odd. (His last essay was full of tense mismatches, most of which he caught when reading it aloud).
I never do art projects, just make sure he has the materials he needs.
For the first grader, the homework is so simple (for example, color the pictures of items that begin with “B”, or do a dot-to-dot picture to prove you know how to count to 100) I just need make sure he did it. There’s usually no need to correct anything. I do usually have to sit with him just to stop him from screwing around.
I don’t think this necessarily (or at all) comes from the teachers, but more likely is a product of how your kid processes information. Mine does this, too. I think it’s an OCD kind of thing, to some extent. With mine, I tell him, “I’m going to show you another way to do this. Neither one is necessarily better than the other, but you should try to understand both. Then you can decide which is more comfortable for you.” It probably stems from the emotional investment of getting their brain around a subject, etched into the gray matter, then someone comes along and challenges all of that. Something they’ll need to get used to in the end, but not as easy for some as others.
It sounds like difficulty in tolerating ambiguity. This is a big issue for a lot of people even into adulthood and has an impact on their choice of suitable careers. Some people are suited to be accountants, with detailed standards to guide them, and others are comfortable in ambiguous environments like entrepreneurs and political appointees. Even in a workplace where jobs are not clearly one way or another, you’ll see those people who always want clear, consistent guidelines and those who are comfortable with more uncertainty. For any given work situation, is it just easier for everyone to do it the same way, or is it worth some inconsistency to give people the freedom to do it how they prefer? Depends on the job, but some people clearly lean one way or the other.
If this does sound to you like something your kid is struggling with, you will probably be doing him a favor, development wise, if you help him gain a little more comfort with ambiguity. Maybe compare athletes who are both successful but have very different styles.